An Incidental Delivery Based Method for Resolving Multirobot Pairwised Transportation Problems

This paper presents a multirobot pairwised transportation (MRPWT) approach for factory automated material and product deliveries. We consider MRPWT from the view-point of robotics and incorporate practical factory application constraints in the transportation method design. The proposed MRPWT approach is a two-level hybrid planning method, consisting of an incidental delivery based single robot level planner and a simulated annealing based robot group level planner. Each robot resolves its individual transportation plan incidentally to reduce the transportation cost, whereas the group level planner utilizes predefined random actions to search the task assignment solution space and then incorporates the simulated annealing algorithm to resolve the MRPWT problem as a combinatorial optimization problem. By implementing a distributed auction mechanism, the proposed MRPWT approach can be further extended to resolve the online task allocation or reallocation problem in dynamic environments. Experiments performed on a group of mobile robots successfully demonstrate the effectiveness and the practical applicability of the proposed MRPWT approach for factory automated material and product deliveries.